


soon to fall and be gone

by Imkerin



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Apocalypse, Borussia Dortmund, First Time, M/M, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-28 17:52:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5100098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imkerin/pseuds/Imkerin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Auba and Marco alone in a hotel at the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	soon to fall and be gone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anemoi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anemoi/gifts).



> please join me in pretending that commercial happened a year earlier than it actually did

“Did you ever think about this?”

Marco looks up from his phone, shoving his hair out of his eyes. The power’s on again, for the first time in a while, so they’re camped on opposite sides of the room, tethered to the outlets by their chargers. Marco hasn’t been able to get reception since the announcement; Auba got through once, for a few seconds, so they’ve been trying ever since, every hour or so for the last few days. “About what?” he asks, because Auba’s leaning against the wall, head tilted back, eyes closed, his phone untouched on the ground at his side.

“This,” Auba says, pointing up. “Before.”

“Oh,” Marco says. He’d thought, for some reason, that they weren’t talking about it. “I don’t know. I guess.”

“I did,” Auba says. He rolls his head against the wall, slowly. His beard is growing out, Marco thinks pointlessly. It looks -- weird. Good, but weird. “You remember that ad?”

“Which?”

“The one with the space aliens that destroyed the planet,” he says, impossibly steady. He doesn’t even flinch. “I used to think about that. It had Götze in it.”

Marco remembers it now, kind of. He’d made fun of Mario for it, back when making fun of Mario leaving him to play alongside Ronaldo and Messi was still hilarious, back before he’d known Auba at all. In hindsight, it still sort of is funny, in a different, nastier way. “They didn’t, though,” he says. “Destroy the planet. They didn’t win.”

“Yeah,” says Auba. He doesn’t mention the crack in Marco’s voice.

 

 

They pile all the furniture up against the door, the big conference table on its side, chairs sticking out all over top like some sort of insane porcupine, and use the whiteboard markers to draw goals right on the walls, scribbling black holes over the white-and-red wallpaper.

“Yours is too small,” Auba says accusingly, waggling his eyebrows and holding up his fingers an inch apart in case Marco was in danger of missing the joke.

“Bitch, the hell it is,” Marco says. He throws his marker at Auba and gets him right in the shoulder with the tip, black ink smearing across the yellow of his polo.

After that they play futsal with one of the training balls and Auba wins anyway.

 

 

For the first day or two they’d gone down to the hotel kitchen and cooked shit: a big pot of pasta that they only partially burned, chicken breasts and steaks out of the walk-in. Then the brown-outs started and they quit seeing so many people down outside the windows and Marco had said, as Auba was digging around looking for a can opener by the light of a flashlight they’d found in reception, “You know, all this shit is just going to melt.”

They ate ice cream in the dark and didn’t talk about it until it did start to melt, and then they went around from room to room, making a game of matching key to lock, collecting water bottles, booze, and candy bars out of the minifridges. When they made it up to the penthouse they got drunk. They don’t talk about that, either.

 

 

“I thought, I used to think, about zombies sometimes,” Marco says, a while later. It sounds dumb and he regrets it immediately.

“Yeah?” Auba says. He shifts around again, getting comfortable on the industrial carpet, then hooks the football out from the corner where they’d left it with his toes.

“Yeah,” Marco says, watching. Something about the stretch of Auba’s leg sticks in the back of his mind, the particular turn of his foot that he’s seen a hundred thousand times. “You know. Evil Dead. Rammbock. Warm Bodies.”

“Warm bodies,” Auba says. He opens one eye and looks at Marco significantly.

“Shut up,” Marco says, but he doesn’t have anything except his phone to throw until Auba rolls him the ball and he throws it back.

 

 

They wake up to sirens and when they stumble up in silence to look out the window something is burning in the distance. It’s almost dawn and Marco can’t see well enough in the near-darkness to make out what it is. He doesn’t know the city well enough to guess.

 _“Penses-tu,”_ Auba says, and falters out.

Marco’s mouth is dry like dust, like paper. “No,” he says, and slides one arm around Auba’s waist, pulling him in. “It hasn’t been long enough.” He means, _since they said on tv we were all going to die,_ but it sounds like forever.

“Okay,” Auba says. “Yeah, okay.” He puts his arm around Marco and they lean against each other, watching the fire burn until it slowly dies out under the heavy, sleety rain. It gets a little lighter out, but the clouds are too thick to watch the sun rise.

 

 

There isn’t anywhere to go, so they haven’t bothered to unbarricade the door. There had been riots that first day, and fires that had been put out by firemen instead of the rain, and police, and soldiers, and instead of trying to get to the stadium, back to the others, they had stayed put by mutual unspoken agreement while everyone else, all the workers and all the tourists, had fucked off out of the hotel into the chaos outside.

The TVs had worked for a while longer, white-eyed reporters giving updates from locked-up studios, but between them they can’t understand a word of Azerbaijani, so all they have are the few clips of American scientists that play on repeat. That’s almost as hard to understand but the general idea seems to be the same: everyone is going to die.

A few days later, in the middle of the second carton of ice cream, Auba had said, “Do you think they’re still there, the guys?” and Marco had said “I don’t know,” and opened another. That night Auba had managed to get through the overloaded networks and the shitty-ass reception for ten seconds and all he’d done was say _“je t’aime”_ over and over until the light on his phone went out, so Marco was pretty sure he hadn’t been calling Tuchel to see if there’s anything left they can do about not dying alone.

They don’t talk about any of that.

 

 

After the night they got drunk, after they’d got done throwing up weird candy bars and the last of the ice cream and about a hundred travel-size bottles of nameless liquor, Marco made a bed on the floor of the conference room out of hotel duvets and scavenged throws and sofa pillows. It would have been easy enough to drag in a mattress, or just go and sleep in one of the hundreds of actual rooms, but somehow, irrationally, he doesn’t want that kind of fake normalcy intruding on this, this, whatever it is. This sitting around with Auba, waiting for the world to end. Mats would have mocked him for ages about regressing to childhood and pillow forts, but Marco doesn’t know if Mats is still alive so he tries not to think about it.

Auba helped him with it, arranging cushions and whatever they could scrounge up right alongside him, and didn’t say a thing about it until they were done and Marco was staring down at it, feeling this disgusting sort of blankness growing in his stomach, the same shit he’d felt when they told him that was it, that he’d done his ligaments. Then he tossed the football into it, right in the middle, where it stopped dead in the thick mess of pillows like a rock in a pond, and he looked at Marco and said, “Your egg’s ready for hatching, birdy.”

“Fuck you,” Marco had said, automatically, and in the middle of laughing about it afterwards realized with a similar short, thudding punch of horror that he actually did want to fuck him.

 

 

They play futsal again and Auba wins again, the ball bouncing against the slightly-smaller goal on Marco’s side of the room like a drumbeat, his form on point like nothing could stop him. Like they are in that dumb commercial of Mario’s, like he could save the world, like maybe if the meteor comes in just right Auba will stretch out and catch it just so, a perfect volley soaring away into the top corner of Jupiter or something, and the world will shout his name. 

Auba rips his shirt off in celebration and flings it across the room, where it catches on the leg of a chair and dangles like a lonely flag. “Ey, yellow card,” Marco protests, and Auba laughs, bent over to catch his breath, and says “Fuck you, ref, you’re fucking blind.”

“Red for dissent,” Marco decides, and Auba flops over with a groan, sprawling out on his back on the floor with the ball for a pillow. He raises one hand and flips Marco off, deliberately.

 

 

Marco keeps time by what they should be doing, saving the batteries as much as he can by only checking the date on his phone when the crushing unreality of everything threatens to pull him under. He wakes up early on Sunday, his head pounding with a relentless hangover and thinks, absurdly: we’re going to miss the derby. He looks over at Auba, asleep curled up on the other half of the gigantic bed, and plays out the game in his head, watching him dream. A hat trick for Auba and a brace for him, and they send the ref off for complaining. Then he gets up and goes to puke it out in the bathroom. It’s one of the nicer bathrooms he’s ever puked in.

When he gets back Auba is still sleeping, so he reaches out and touches his hair, gently, gentler than he does when Auba’s awake, because this is just for him. His face is warm next to Marco’s hand, and without thinking much about it Marco punches him in the shoulder and says “Hey,” just to see the horrible expression he makes when he wakes up. Marco likes that.

 

 

Eventually they get tired of candy bars, even the kind with the caramel shortbread bottom that they both like enough to wrestle over. (Marco wins those, usually, because he plays dirty.) The power’s still out, it hasn’t come back on even a flicker since the last time, so they’re sitting in the half-light, shoulder to shoulder, sharing a bag of chips that Auba brought along, each eating one at a time, taking turns like it’s some weird ritual. Marco wipes the salty grease off his fingers onto the hem of his shirt like a gross kid because he has no reason not to.

Auba makes a rude noise at him and Marco laughs at him, grabbing two chips instead of one. “Should have thought of that before,” he says, because Auba’s shirt is still hanging on the chair leg, their wall of one.

“Bitch,” Auba says, and wipes his hands on Marco’s shorts instead. It devolves quickly into another wrestling match, Marco’s hands skidding over bare skin, Auba’s fists tangled in Marco’s shirt, tearing at it, like he’s hunting for another red. This time Auba wins and Marco’s mangled shirt joins his on the chairs, black next to yellow.

Afterwards they mean to finish the chips but someone’s ass landed square on them during the scuffle and they’re almost entirely dust, now. Auba tilts his head back and pours the crumbs into his mouth, mumbling something about a forfeit, and Marco can’t take his eyes off the long line of his neck, the wild unshaven scruff of his beard.

 

 

“Did you ever think about,” Marco says, and stops. They have one day left, or something like. It’s still too gray and sleety to see much outside; it’s been raining for a long time now. He doesn’t know exactly when the impact is supposed to be, anyway, and he’s okay with that. Those few minutes or hours more or less of added time, he’s used to that. His life runs on that. He’s not used to saying this, because he’s never said it before; he’s never had to. He doesn’t want to die without saying it.

“About what?”

Rolling over onto his back, he stares up at the ceiling, counting the pinholes in the sound-absorbing tile. He has a sudden grim certainty that he’s going to fuck this up, just like he fucks everything else up when it really counts. “Guys,” he says.

The duvets shift underneath him as Auba moves, but Marco doesn’t look over, just keeps counting dots, eighteen per row.

“Hey, bro,” Auba says, when Marco’s on number 37. He sounds - not tentative, not scared, but just -- careful, like he knows how easy this would be to fuck up, how delicate it is between them, like an actual egg instead of a stupid joke with a football. His hand slides into Marco’s and their fingers fold together and it feels real, it feels like jumping on Auba’s back with 70,000 people screaming his name. It doesn’t feel like fucking up.

 

 

They had started sneezing on the plane, both of them; nearly at the same time, but Marco half a beat ahead of Auba so it echoed ridiculously, like a badly tuned trumpet. By the time they touched down in Qabala they’d already been quarantined in the back of the plane and told in no uncertain terms that if they weren’t feeling 100% by the morning they’d be in the hotel instead of on the field. Auba’s protest that he didn’t feel bad at all was interrupted by another honking sneeze that he barely managed to tuck into his shoulder instead of letting go in Tuchel’s face and Marco choked trying to hide a laugh and coughed for five minutes straight.

So they stayed in the hotel instead of going to the pre-match training, watching music videos on Auba’s phone and snuffling their way through a box of tissues. By game time they felt mostly better - or at least Marco did and Auba swore he did too, and without sneezing this time - but they stayed put as ordered, flicking through the channels on the TV and calling each other plague rats. They found the announcement before the game, and then, pretty soon, that was the only thing on any of the channels.

 

 

“No,” Auba says eventually, “not really.” His hand is still hot in Marco’s, anchoring him down. Marco feels like he might blow away otherwise in the nonexistent draft in the stuffy growing cold of the room, sickly weightless and empty. When Auba tugs at his arm, he doesn’t resist, can’t, and rolls over to face him as directed.

Auba’s lying on his side, looking at him solemnly. Marco feels pinned by it, like a bug stabbed through the middle onto a piece of pasteboard, watching Auba watching him. “You do,” Auba says. Not _you did_. The difference is there, bare and raw in his eyes.

“Yeah,” Marco says. He wants a drink, he wants to pass out and wake up in the penthouse and watch Auba sleep, snoring quietly with his mouth just a little open, his shirt rucking up around his waist, showing a tiny sliver of skin on his belly, his feet tangled in the sheets. He wants to live the week over. He doesn’t want to take any of it back. “I guess. Maybe.”

Auba’s lips twitch, just a little, but he only says, “You are so shit at this.”

“I know,” Marco says. He does. It's not the first time he's heard it.

“ _I guess_?” Auba says, and his grin comes out like sunshine, his eyebrows quirking up in melodramatic shock. “ _Maybe_?”

“Fuck off,” Marco says, “and you’re so much better?”

“ _Je t’adore,_ bro,” Auba says. “ _Je t’aimerai toujours_.” The weird thing is he sounds like he means it, all warm and soft and completely not awkward at all, like he used up all his shitty acting already and all that's left is this. He kisses the same way, his lips teasing Marco’s open easily, naturally, as if they’ve been doing this for years, the way they play, the way they’ve always been together.

For a minute or five that’s enough, and then it’s not, because Marco can’t ever leave well enough alone. It’s a curse that helps him ruin things. “You said not really,” he says. It’s a little absurd to be saying that into Auba’s mouth, so close that he has to breathe Auba’s air to say it, so close their lips brush in a new kiss with every word, and it’s a little absurd to say it now, when toujours means tomorrow. But he’s so tired of being second best, of being a stopgap until something better comes along, that even if nothing better can ever happen again he doesn’t want to end it all being almost good enough.

“I could have,” Auba says the same way, then pauses just long enough for Marco to feel the curve of his smile, the hard edge of his teeth as he laughs silently. “I guess, maybe--” and Marco kisses him again to shut him up. “I could,” Auba says again, afterwards, as breathless as Marco feels. Marco rolls over again, on top of Auba this time, this delicate thing still between them, unbroken between the press of their bare skin. “I can, for you.”

After that it doesn’t feel like desperation when Auba doesn’t know quite where to put his hands, when he lets Marco lead him through it, when his fingers rake through Marco’s lank unstyled hair and pull hard as Marco sucks him until he gasps things that sound a lot less sugarsweet but just as real. He fucks Marco slowly, bare because it doesn’t matter, jerking him off tight and slick without Marco having to ask for it, and says his name like he isn’t even trying to pretend he’s somewhere else with someone else, and it feels good. It feels right. It feels like they aren’t the last two guys left on earth, like he can let himself believe that Auba would have chosen him anyway.

When Auba’s done he sighs and kisses Marco’s shoulder but doesn’t pull out, just slumps down and lies there on top of him, inside him, a big heavy living blanket that smells strongly of candy and sweat. Marco is a little sore, but he isn’t cold anymore, so he doesn’t tell Auba to fuck off. He reaches back to tangle their fingers together again, instead, and Auba squeezes his hand.

 

 

They wait.


End file.
